1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to provisioning network services. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to recovering provisioned services in network elements after a full or partial failure of the network element.
2. Background Information
In a data or voice communications network, various network elements (NE), such as a remote terminal (RT) or an optical concentrator device (OCD) used to implement digital subscriber line (DSL) services, periodically fail, for example, due to a power disruption or failure. This requires replacement and/or recovery of the respective circuits that had been provisioned in the NEs prior to the failure. Typically, the circuits may be recovered using backup information maintained by another network device, such as an element management system (EMS) that originally provisioned the circuits or that contains complete provisioning data despite the failure. For example, an EMS may be updated with circuit information from the NE on a periodic basis by uploading the information from the NE, essentially providing back-up data for the NE. If all circuit information was uploaded prior to the failure, the recovery process can be performed by the EMS. However, updates to the NE circuits occurring after the most recent information upload to the EMS will not be contained in the EMS, and will be lost should the NE fail before the next upload (or other backup) occurs.
In a network that provides DSL services, recovering lost circuits is tantamount to reprovisioning each circuit in the same manner as originally done. For example, the reprovisioning requires determining the facility to provision, determining the endpoint information and building the corresponding logical cross-connects, and determining and provisioning the discrete multi-tone (DMT) parameters defining the service. The DMT parameters include, for example, data speeds, noise margins, channel interleave delays, and power spectral densities. For circuits having information not in the EMS, the process of recovery must be performed manually. This is done, for example, using a graphical user interface (GUI) or a command line interface (CLI) to the EMS. Such a manual recovery is time consuming, inefficient and error prone, especially where the number of NEs and/or circuits that must be recovered is large. Further, data used for the recovery must be retrieved from the system that originally provisioned the affected circuits, which also must be done manually.